


Body Parts Bingo

by PhilipJFright



Category: LISA (Video Games)
Genre: 'terry hintz is chronically ill and that's half the plot' and i apologize in advance, Canon Disabled Character, Child Death, Hospitals, Medical Trauma, every fic i write for this fandom is just gonna be, yup we're talkin' about joey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 05:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21422749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhilipJFright/pseuds/PhilipJFright
Summary: “'S good to see a sick kid grow up,” says Birdie, and Terry’s never felt more guilty for being alive in his life.
Relationships: als brad and terry are like a thing if you squint but this one's not about that, terry and birdie are the focus here but it's platonic
Comments: 7
Kudos: 38





	Body Parts Bingo

Terry’s sick. Well, sicker than usual, “normal-people sick,” like he used to call it before the world ended.

He’s been coughing, wetter than usual, and he’s been trying not to think about it.

He’s broken away from the group at least six times in the last day, to find a rock to spit up behind, or a stump to sit on. He does it quietly, and he’s not sure the others even notice— he hopes, at least, that the others don’t notice. He can handle it on his own, and there’s not much they can do anyway, so there’s no point in them wasting any time or energy.

He wipes his lips of phlegm, spits once more to clear the taste from his mouth, and kicks dirt over the whole mess. The guys haven’t made too much headway in the few minutes he’s been gone, and he jogs to catch up with them, ignoring when his lungs tell him to slow down and stop.

Nobody acknowledges him when he gets back, and he’s glad.

* * *

They’re talking about their lives before it all went to shit, and it’s nice, almost. It’s warm, at the very least, between the roaring campfire and the potato liquor, and warmth is just about the best they can all hope for.

Nobody goes in too deep, even Nern’s incredibly long ramblings feel surface-level, in a way. A lot of talk about nothing, but it’s something to listen to, which is how you can describe most conversations with him, when you really get down to it. A million different stories, but they all feel the same.

The others don’t really get in a word edgewise, but that’s only partially to do with Nern. Brad doesn’t have anything he wants to share, bristles when Nern, in a rare moment of seemingly understanding the natural ebb and flow of conversation, asks about any family, and Terry gets him onto another story about a neighbor so Brad can avoid an answer. The only thing they’ve ever gotten out of Brad is that he used to own a dojo, and Terry, at the very least, has realized by now that it would be cruel to ask him anything more.

Birdie speaks occasionally, starts a story, but he can never seem to remember the endings to any of them, or he realizes he doesn’t like the endings very much and dissolves into quiet tears. They’ve learned by now that trying to take the bottle in his hand (and there’s always a bottle in his hand) will only make his breakdowns worse, so they let him quietly sniff and snivel and sip and Nern wraps a dirty old shawl they’d been meaning to pawn off around his shoulders.

They all assume he’s asleep by the time Nern’s latest story ends, and Terry begins speaking— at the very least, the crying and the drinking has died down, and those things don’t tend to stop with Birdie unless he’s out for the night.

To be honest, Terry doesn’t have much to tell, at least not much that’s interesting. He can’t speak much about his family, hadn’t seen them since they kicked him out full decades before the Flash, and the jobs he held were more out of necessity than anything he liked to do. He can’t think of any friends to talk about, didn’t really have any, no relationships worth revisiting, and most hospital stories, in his experience, bum people out, but Nern told a story and he feels like he should too, so he pulls a little deeper and manages to ask,

“… You guys ever heard of Body Parts Bingo?”

The looks on their faces tell him they haven’t, and he grins, because this isn’t a gross hospital story, not a scary one, just something bizarre, something actually fun to talk about.

“So I was in the hospital a lot, as a kid,” Brad knows this, he’s told him, but he thinks this is new information to Nern. Still, he breezes past the why, plowing straight into the story. “And the hospital I went to used to have this tv channel that you could just, like, flip onto when you were there. They had a few, some about how to keep healthy, or who to call if you pulled a tube out, mostly for parents I think, but they had this one for kids. Sometimes they just played, like, footage from a zoo, so we could see penguins and shit, or sometimes they had people read a book or something, but every Tuesday they had Body Parts Bingo.”

He takes another swig of liquor, coughs, keeps going.

“They’d pass out these cards to everyone in quarantine, ‘cause— well, it was live, the hospital had this playroom kinda thing, but you weren’t allowed in if you were super contagious or super sick, so some kids got to just play in the room, but most of us didn’t. Think I played it there once, dunno, I was usually too sick to go in there.” He shrugs, it doesn’t really matter. “So you’d get this card delivered to your room, and it had, like… bingo at the top, but it also had… so instead’ve numbers, the B row would be… kidney, spleen, small intestine, heart, yanno, that junk, with a word and a picture. Trachea. Think I won with trachea once. B, trachea.”

He takes another chug, wipes his mouth, coughs.

“Anyway, the lady reading everything had a lab coat and like… mad scientist goggles or some shit, and she had this lifesize paper guy, and whenever she called out an organ, she’d tell us what it did, and she’d make, like some joke about it or something, and then she’d smack—” Terry pounds a hand, open palmed, on the rock he’s sitting on,“—it right up there on the paper guy, wherever it went. And like, if you got enough to get a bingo, you’d have to call in, and you’d have to say all the organs you got, so you’d have all these little kids calling in and going ‘B, gallbladder, I, kidney, N….’ uh…”

“… Skull?” Brad tries, and Terry shakes his head.

“Nah, man, not an organ, I’m pretty sure the skeletal system was, like, a whole different card. They never mixed ‘em.” He finishes off the bottle, coughs, then keeps going. “Anyway, you’d get these prizes for listing out a buncha organs and shit— or skeleton stuff, maybe. I dunno. I don’t remember, maybe they didn’t have skeleton stuff. Or, that was like, the third round… Anyway, I was always so close to winning, and I like, never did.”

“Never?” Nern asks, keeping his sentences short for once, at that in-between stage of drunkenness when he’s almost quiet, right before he dips into nonsensical, nonstop rambling.

“Well, like, sometimes, but not when it mattered, I always got a win after the good shit was gone. I had my eye on this fuckin’ teddy bear once, one of those huge ones that take up half your bed, and I got a bingo and I called in and I got put on hold and this girl in fuckin’ pulmonology ward got through before me and had the same card, and guess who got the fuckin’ bear?”

“Alright, I gotta ask,” Brad says, and Terry thinks he can see a smile under his beard. “How old were you when you lost that bear?”

“Six, and I’ve never fuckin’ forgotten it,” Terry says, with more bitterness in his voice than any of the guys have ever heard from him. “I mean, it was fun though,” he says after a minute, voice becoming a little more chipper, “Like, there’s not a lot to do when you were sick, and it was cool of the hospital to put it together, it’s just kinda funny to have a buncha sick kids listing body parts a—”

“… You were sick?”

They don’t expect to hear anything from Birdie, they would have bet 30 mags each that he had drunk himself to sleep, but he’s up, sloppily wiping drool from his face.

“… Yeah,” says Terry, shrugging. “Still am, kinda, but, like, it was worse when I was a kid. Lotsa hospital visits— I mean, not anymore, can’t do much if I get sick now, but…”

Birdie’s gaze is never really focused, his eyes are rarely even fully open, which is why Terry is surprised into silence when he notices the drunkard staring at him, taking him in with wide, watery eyes.

* * *

The group figured out a while ago that Birdie had lost two boys. He’s mourned them in their presence, weeping their names between sips from a bottle like some sort of drunken prayer. They’ve never been able to piece together how, exactly, but none of them feel it’s right to ask, and they assume it was in the first few years after the Flash.

A lot of kids died in those early days— a lot of kids die now, of course, but those early days were especially hard, and Birdie is… soft. He’s sweet and he’s small and he’s soft, and anything as soft as him would have had a hard time of it, anything that managed to be sweeter and smaller, well… 

They don’t like to think about Birdie’s boys, and with all the drinking, they’re pretty sure he doesn’t either.

* * *

Terry feels even sicker the next day. Sleep had been impossible as usual, made more impossible by the fact that Brad had managed to actually sleep alright for once. Terry’s glad for that, of course, Brad more than deserves a night of real rest, but it had made it that much harder to muscle through the night without a voice to talk to and a warm body to cling to.

The hangover isn’t making things any better.

His stomach is bad a lot— even before the Flash, it was a wreck, it seemed to rebel against anything he put in it, and a diet of jerky, roadside soup, expired cola and home-brewed booze hasn’t really helped matters much.

He’s felt on the edge of vomiting since he first woke up, and his head is pounding, and he’s sure he’s showing his fatigue but the others, thankfully, don’t force him to stop.

The first few times the road took its toll on Terry, the guys had insisted the group stop, rest, and Terry hated it, hated feeling like he was slowing down the search for Buddy. Yes, sometimes he would start wheezing, or he’d step to the side for a minute to spit something up, sometimes he would pause for a few seconds to catch his breath, lower his pulse, but that didn’t mean they all had to stop, or set up camp, he was _ fine. _

He hadn’t talked about being sick to anyone but Brad, but Nern and Birdie hadn’t questioned these occasions, assumed he was out of shape, maybe, or just kind of weak. The assumptions wouldn’t have been wrong, exactly. They stopped insisting that he rest, and while Terry had appreciated, beyond measure, that people had cared enough to be concerned— he had grown used to people telling him to hurry up, yelling at him or refusing to believe him when he said that he couldn’t— it was probably for the best that they didn’t worry over him too much. They’d stopped acknowledging these breaks all together, and he’d hoped so much that they weren’t even noticing them anymore.

So when he breaks off from the group to vomit again, and Birdie’s there to ask whether he should stop for a while, he bristles.

“… You said that you were sick last night,” he says, quiet, his eyes wet, and Terry’s stomach sinks.

“I’m fine, dude,” he says, and there’s a sharpness to it that he doesn’t mean. He knows Birdie is just concerned, it’s _ sweet _ that he’s concerned, but he doesn’t want to feel like a burden and he knows that this sympathy only ever lasts so long and if he lets himself take breaks then the sympathy will run dry and turn into resentment. 

He doesn’t want the group to resent him. He knows they will, eventually, it’s an inevitability, but he doesn’t want it to start yet.

* * *

Birdie only talks about his family, coherently, when the others are asleep. Terry’s up again, he’s up a lot, and Birdie’s managed to lay off the drink long enough to be up with him.

He starts talking suddenly— there’s no real progression to the conversation, they’re both just sitting at the campfire, Terry leaned against a sleeping Brad and Birdie chewing on a piece of jerky when Birdie says, “Joey was sick, y’know,” and Terry immediately figures out where this is going, why he stayed up to tell him this, and realizes he doesn’t want to hear it.

But Birdie has never managed to speak about his sons at any real length, and he’s almost sober, and it feels wrong to stop him, so Terry bites his tongue, lets the other man continue.

“He was always sick, ’t least a little, you know, he was… one’ve those blue babies,” Birdie starts, kicking at the dirt under his feet, and Terry nods. He was one of them too, actually, but he doesn’t know if he wants to make a connection between himself and Joey. It feels unkind, somehow. Besides, the zipper down his chest has probably clued Birdie in. “Cutest little thing… small, he… well Melissa, neither… neither of us were big, but god, he was _ small_. When he was born, his whole hand couldn’t wrap around my pinkie…” He takes another bite of jerky and looks into the fire. “Jimmy wasn’t that small, he was… he was a strong kid. Took after my dad, but Joey…”

He speaks like he’s telling Terry something urgent, a conspiracy, almost, like this is meant for only him.

“Well, I think he looked like Lissy, but… you know, she didn’t… she tried, but she… I was fine raising 'em, really, but… Well, she didn’t sign up for… for everything happening with Joey, and…” And Terry can tell that Birdie’s trying, that he’s trying so hard not to be angry, and he thinks about a guy he lived with for months coming to the emergency room only to tell him, voice raised to make himself heard over a nebulizer, that this was too much, that he _ hadn’t signed up for this, _ and he tries not to be angry, too. “… Said she’d raise Jimmy, you know, but… it prob’ly would’ve been best, maybe he wouldn’t’ve— but I didn’t… I didn’t think that… how ‘d _ Joey _ feel, he was so little but I couldn’t separate ‘em, Jimmy— the minute he saw his brother, he was in love with him, he was so prouda bein’ a big brother, he would’ve been crushed, they… they couldn’t lose each other, she shouldn’t get to _ choose _ which _ — _so… she didn’t, she didn’t choose, she…” His voice cracks, he reaches for a half empty whiskey bottle that Nern had been sipping out of a few hours ago, and Terry hands it to him.

“Tried callin’ her when Joey got real sick, _ sick _ sick, just… money help, she never paid much child support and— and we managed, I didn’t need ‘er, but then he needed another surgery, a real big surgery and…” he chugs the bottle, downs the contents in one gulp. “… She might’ve changed her number, yanno? Might’ve just… I mighta just been missin’ her, or… Or she moved… She didn’t call back when Jimmy… Didn’t come to the funeral or answer when the p’lice… So she must’ve moved.”

He’s running his thumb over the bottle now, and he’s lucid, but he’s crying, and Terry knows there’s another bottle, a full one, hidden away in Brad’s pack, and it’s supposed to be medicinal, for disinfecting wounds, but Birdie looks like he desperately needs some medicine, so he takes the pack and rummages through it and hands it off, and he’ll come up with an excuse to tell Brad in the morning. 

He doesn’t ask what happened to Jimmy, he can read between the lines and refuses to read too deep, especially when, as he hands him the bottle, Birdie’s eyes linger on the long-faded scars on his forearm.

Birdie manages a quiet thanks that sounds more like a sob, and he says, “It just felt… I felt like I should tell you… When you said you were sick that young, I…” and Terry feels a wave of shame wash over him, and his stomach churns and he can’t breathe and he wonders how much worse Birdie would get if he vomited then and there.

“’S good to see a sick kid grow up,” says Birdie, and Terry’s never felt more guilty for being alive in his life. It’s incredible how this feels worse than watching Brad lose a goddamn arm.

“… I’m sorry,” he manages to croak out, and Birdie shakes his head.

“Don’ be, I— I mean it.” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, wipes the back of his hand on his poncho. “… I knew kids would… We didn’ go t’the hospital a lot, went when we could but… I met parents there, I learned their kids’ names, never… never found out if those kids ever got better. Liked to think some’ve did, but… but that got… it was hard to think that, so you’re… proof. Some’ve ‘em must’ve.”

He refuses to admit that he’s not better, because that’s not what Birdie needs to hear, and he nods. “I know they did, man. Most kids… I think most kids in the hospital… It’s probably just one scare. I think most kids get better.” He doesn’t know this, honestly, but it feels like something he should say, and Birdie gives a tired smile.

“Y’think?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Birdie nods, drinks, leans back a little. “… My boys liked that bingo you mentioned. When we were able to go to the hospital, they— they always hoped it’d be a Tuesday. Joey liked learning about… all that body stuff, I guess, and Jimmy just, he was competitive. Never won, though… got some other prize—“

“Little stuffed animals,” Terry says, and Birdie’s eyes light up with recognition. “I had like a million of those as a kid, they used to visit all the rooms, make sure anyone who played got something small.”

“They always gave us two,” Birdie says, smiling. “Jimmy wasn’ sick, but… they gave us two, since he was stayin’ in the hospital too.” He snorts, eyes crinkling. “Used to piss Joey off so much, ‘cause he wasn’t even _ sick._ But he always asked for a card for him anyway.”

They sit in silence for a while, listening to the fire, and it’s not as uncomfortable as Terry expects it to be. At the very least, he no longer feels like he’s going to throw up.

“… He’d’ve been 23 by now,” Birdie finally says. “Jimmy… Jimmy woulda been 28.”

“… What do you think they’d’ve been like?” He’s not sure what prompts the question and he realizes, after, that might be an awful thing to ask, but Birdie chuckles, and when he speaks, it’s clear he’s thought about this a lot.

“Scientist. Joey was smart, loved— every time we went to a doctor, he had a million questions, he… Everything had to have an answer.” His words are slower, slurred, and Terry realizes that giving Birdie more booze might have been the wrong idea, he might not have been as sober at the start of his conversation as he thought, “If it didn’t, he… y’know, I wasn’t the smartest guy, I couldn’t keep— keep up, couldn’t answer lotsa stuff he wanted to know. He picked up the slack, though, he— he found answers— Jimmy… he was just… he was smart too, dunno where they got it from, more… more creative I guess, he was such a good writer, he— what he wrote for Joey’s—” he stops, takes a long swig. “… He was a sweet kid. Both’ve ‘em were. Jimmy would’ve wrote.”

He looks sleepy, and the bottle Terry gave him is drained. His eyes droop slightly, and he looks across the fire towards Terry, slumps over.

“They were good kids.”

* * *

He doesn’t have a hangover the next day, since Birdie drunk their whole stash, but his stomach is still churning when he wakes up. Nothing else has gotten any better, and his chest is tight.

He tells Brad that they needed the booze last night, that it was medicinal, and when Brad asks how medicinal, Terry says it wasn’t Birdie’s idea, it was his, and they leave it at that.

The road is dusty, as usual, and it’s not making his nausea any better, and between the dust clogging his lungs and the gagging, it’s taking a lot for him not to cough.

He doesn’t want everyone to stop. He doesn’t _ need _ them to, and if he doesn’t need them to, then it’s not worth slowing the group down. They still have a few hours of daylight to burn, at least, though it’s hard to guess how many with Olathe’s weather patterns. He can break away from the group and catch up, no point in wasting any time.

He’s not surprised this time when Birdie joins him.

“Sittin’ up helps,” he says, when Terry sits down in the dirt and folds in on himself, coughing and gagging. He nods— he knows, it’s just hard to stay sitting up when you’re like this— but he manages to get upright when Birdie sits down next to him.

Birdie rummages under his poncho for something, finds a bottle of soup— still hot, they only picked it up about ten minutes ago— and unstoppers it, hands it to Terry. “Don’t drink it, jus’… the steam helps.”

“Thanks,” Terry manages, then, “I’ll cough all over it though, man.”

“Keep it,” Birdie shrugs. “You gotta get those lungs clear.”

“… I used to let the shower run, when nebs didn’t work,” Terry says, almost surprised that Birdie knows about the steam. The smell isn’t helping his nausea much, but he doesn’t move it away. “Sit in the bathroom with the door closed, middle of the night, turn the whole place into a sauna.”

Birdie chuckles, and Terry notices, for the first time, that he hasn’t flinched once at Terry’s coughing, and he realizes that he’s the first person in recent memory who never once asked him why he sounded like that. “Did that with Joey. Middle of the night, too.”

And, despite last night’s talk, it finally hits home that, yeah, Birdie used to be a _ dad._

“I think it’s some kinda curse, you always get worse at like, three a.m., right when waking anyone’ll piss ‘em off.”

“… Jimmy never liked bein’ woken up, but he was good about it, usually.” Birdie looks at Terry then, adds as explanation, “Shared a room. He came an’ woke me when Joey was bad sometimes, ‘f I didn’t hear it first.”

“… Shit, sounds like a good brother.”

Birdie nods. “Waited outside the door some nights when they were both real little, and Joey always fell asleep on the toilet,” he seems to get how that might sound odd, and clarifies, “put ‘im there ‘cause—”

Terry snorts, waves a hand. “So he wouldn’t fall over, don’t worry, I gotcha. I fell in the bath once ‘cause I thought I could just, like, rest on the rim and I fell asleep. Woke up right away, though, which is good, ‘cause I fell on the drain. Soaked my pjs, though.”

“Christ, yeah, didn’t want any’ve that. An’ he _ always _ fell asleep, so I’d sit him down an’ prop him up and bring a pillow or somethin’, wait till he sounded less wheezy. Jimmy’d be outside the door and I’d jus’… carry both’ve ‘em back to bed. Sometimes he’d go back to wheezin’ and we’d start over again, if we couldn’t… if the hospital wasn’t an option. Those were long nights.”

“… You stayed up with him?” Terry asks, and Birdie just looks at him, surprised.

“‘Course I did,” he says, and Terry realizes that there’s absolutely no resentment hidden in his voice. 

The soup isn’t steaming anymore, and while it's not by much, Terry does feel clearer, at least a little. The nausea’s died down a bit, too, surprisingly enough, and it occurs to Terry that he hasn’t eaten anything since he woke up. “… Mind if I drink this?” he asks, even though Birdie already said it was his, and the man laughs.

“‘M not in any position t’tell anyone not t’drink anything.”

“… That’s fair,” Terry laughs, and the soup, a pretty simple broth, goes down easier than expected.

“Think I got some water, too, if y’need it. That’s prob’ly kinda salty.”

“Nah, I’m good. Been checking my breath, it’s not bad, not dehydrated.”

“Good, good,” Birdie nods. “Don’t wanna get there.”

They sit for a little while longer, Terry sipping at the soup, Birdie watching him, looking like he wants to make sure he can keep it down. He spits up at one point, and Birdie doesn’t wrinkle his nose or move away, but he hands him a cola— warm, but not flat— and makes sure he finishes it, and throughout this, Terry doesn’t feel once like he’s being pitied. Birdie never once suggests that they should get back to the group, that Terry should keep moving.

It takes a while for the others to circle back around, to realize they’re missing, maybe, or to realize they won’t be coming back soon. 

Terry’s first instinct is to get up and get moving when he sees Nern and Brad, but Birdie doesn’t seem to have the same idea, because the first words out of his mouth are, “Terry ’n I jus’ need to rest a bit.”

“… Yeah?” asks Brad, surprised, and Terry wants to disagree, say that maybe Birdie needs it, but that he’s okay, but he doesn’t.

Instead he lets out a hoarse, “Yeah, need a couple minutes,” surprising himself, and Birdie smiles a little. 

And the funny thing is that when Nern and Brad sit down, neither one seems to mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Birdie Hall please know that I would die for you  
Unfortunately another case of "no proofreading we publish immediately like men"  
Also I have no idea what to call this, so any ideas for a title are HEAVILY appreciated
> 
> EDIT: sketched out what I think Joey and Jimmy looked like for anyone interested:  
https://www.deviantart.com/cutenerdybean23/art/joey-and-jimmy-820333869
> 
> EDIT 2: Feel like I should say that I did not make up the idea of Body Parts Bingo, it's a real thing my hospital did and still does. Here's a picture of what the setup looks like.  
https://assets.dnainfo.com/generated/chicago_photo/2014/11/extra-technician-treacy-1415641270.jpg/extralarge.jpg


End file.
